This is the story of my nontraditional transformation from a Physics/Spanish/Chemistry/Math grad into a physician. I'm a proud member of the class of 2016 at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine. The blog title will be edited to reflect the current stage of my transformation: Pre-Medical, Medical, Residential, then Doctoral. Read more about me in the My Story tab below. Enjoy!

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Sunday, August 25, 2013

Healthy & Home & Ready to Go!

If you've been reading, you know that I was admitted to the hospital last Thursday due to some nasty abdominal pain that had been getting worse and worse thoughout our impromptu road trip through Colorado. At first they were sure it was my appendix, then they did a CT scan and weren't so sure, since the walls of my ascending colon was about three times the normal thickness and I had excess fluid in my abdomen.

As it turns out, I have a family history of ulcerative colitis and intestinal cancer, so this was a fairly scary thing to find from the CT. To determine whether one of these family heirlooms was present in my bowels, the docs ordered a colonoscopy. So, I drank the ~1gal of synthetic fluid that washes out your bowels over the course of a few hours, and they put me under. My large intestine checked out clean - hooray - no ulcerative colitis or intestinal cancer/polyps. As it turns out, my pain was the result of an infection of some sort (either viral or bacterial) in my ascending colon. They've got me on some antibiotics, and everything is (slowly) starting to get better. I can eat, walk around, and carry things now with manageable amounts of pain. Given that when I was admitted three days ago I needed morphine in order to eat anything, this is a HUGE improvement.

And it's just in time, since TOMORROW MORNING I start my first day of the second year of med school. Yikes. I'm incredibly glad that it all got sorted out the way it did. I stood a very real possibility of having to miss classes during the very first week of second year, which I doubt would be very conducive to a successful year.

So now I scramble a bit to figure out what books I'm going to buy, what classrooms to be in for small group discussions, etc. etc.. I'm also trying to get the photos from this road trip edited and put up on here, but that might not happen until later in the week or the following weekend. We'll see. Just know that I'm out of the hospital and ready to tackle this coming year of school. Later!